There was everything to 'like' about Fr. Doug

In my line of work for the last 30 years, I’ve met plenty of priests: pastors, parochial vicars, bishops, teachers, counselors, chaplains.

Those interactions almost always have been warm, gracious and uplifting. Priests toil faithfully, their work hidden mostly in the shadows. They are beacons to a broken world even when they don’t have the physical strength to answer another phone call at 2 a.m. from someone who needs a word of assurance.

And then there was Father Doug Brougher, the man in the white coat and white collar at Touro Infirmary, the man with an effervescent smile and unsurpassed compassion who spent nearly 40 years as a hospital chaplain.

Aside from our occasional five-minute conversations at priests’ convocations or ordinations, we didn’t interact a lot. But, when he died last week at the age of 86 – a peaceful death in his bedroom lounge chair while wearing his hospital chaplain’s coat at the St. Stephen’s rectory – my thoughts immediately ran to the thousands of patients Father Doug had helped transition from life, with all of its struggles, to a happy death.

How providential it was that Father Doug had experienced the happy death that he had prayed for others to experience.

He may have been 86, but friends knew him as something of a senior savant on the computer. Facebook’s Meta Business Suite has algorithms for everything. It even keeps track of how many times a reader “likes” a business page’s post.

A few years ago, Father Doug began winning, week after week, the Facebook algorithm for “Top Clarion Herald Fan.” It was no contest. Sometimes, he’d dip to No. 2 or No. 3 in a given month, but he always managed to rally like Secretariat rumbling down the stretch at the Belmont.

How deep was his love for the Clarion Herald? Father Doug even “liked” our calendar of events.

I asked him once about being the Clarion Herald’s best Facebook fan.

“I just love what y’all do,” he told me. “It gives me a lot of pleasure, and I know you are helping a lot of people.”

Father Doug’s connection to the Clarion Herald goes back to his years in Rome as a seminarian for the Archdiocese of New Orleans at the Pontifical North American College. He was a newly ordained priest in 1962 – 13 of his family members flew to Rome for his ordination – when then-Archbishop John Cody was planning to launch the Clarion Herald in February 1963.

In his next two years of extended studies in Rome in the midst of the Second Vatican Council, Father Doug and the other New Orleans seminarians received in the mail a weekly care package from home – the Clarion Herald.

“Archbishop Cody wanted us all to receive it, so he air-mailed us every issue!” Father Doug said.

Father Doug had the charism of St. Ignatius of Loyola burned into his heart: In all things, be grateful.

When Touro Infirmary honored him in 2021 with the Judah Touro Society Award as the person in the hospital community who models “compassion, empathy, respect and care for the welfare of others,” Father Doug talked about what God had done in his life. A bout with vertigo had only recently forced him to use a cane to steady himself in walking the maze of hospital hallways, but he never stopped seeing patients.

“The mantra I try to live by is to focus on the blessings – because we always have blessings – and not on the losses,” he said. “Even if you end up in a bed of pain, you are always blessed. There was a nun I met once who couldn’t leave her bed. She was blind, but she was happy. I asked her, ‘How?’ And she said, ‘Well, there are other people who come to take care of me. There are people who bring me a meal. I have a roof over my head. I have a bed.’

“She had a ministry of prayer and a second ministry – the ministry of hospitality. You welcome the people who come to take care of you. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s hard to do, and sometimes I flunk at that, but I think that mantra is the secret to aging.”

Another woman Father Doug will never forget was unconscious in the ICU for weeks. Although she could not respond to his prayers, he visited her every day and held her hand as he prayed.

One day, he entered the woman’s room and, to his amazement, she was sitting up in bed talking to the nurse.

“You don’t know me, but I’ve been seeing you every day,” Father Doug told her.

“I know you,” she replied. “You came to see me every day, and you touched me and prayed with me.”

“I still get chills over that,” Father Doug said. “That’s one of the most powerful stories in my life.”

Hit the “like” button. Thank you, Father Doug.

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